Gun Control As Stray Voltage And A Political Diversion

Yesterday, Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds had a piece in USA Today that we should keep in mind as we watch the shenanigans the White House is up to. He asks why the Democrats are suddenly frothing over gun control? Why has the New York Times used the killing of fourteen innocent people by Islamic extremists as a catalyst for a front page editorial, not in Islamic extremism but on gun control? For context, neither Pearl Harbor nor 9/11 rated a front page editorial. And why is Obama, and his evil one-eyed minion, Harry Reid, using this instance of terrorism to focus not on terrorism but on an issue that will not help the Democrats win voters anywhere? And why are they doing it in an election year?

So is the Times editorializing now because gun control is more important than Pearl Harbor? Or because Obama is in trouble? Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”

Those are all things that the Obama Administration — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — don’t want to talk about. So the editorial board of the Times has pulled out all the stops to ensure that we talk about gun control instead. Gun control isn’t a great issue for the Democrats, but it’s better than all those other topics of discussion, and the expected angry response from the gun-rights community will ensure that people aren’t talking about topics that make the White House look bad.

This approach — basically, trolling the public — is a variation on a tactic that Obama advisor David Plouffe calls ”stray voltage,” about which CBS’s John Dickerson commented, “The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama’s journey in office.”

To me, this also explains the growth of the #BlackLivesMatter. By focusing on real and perceived racial issues in policing (to be clear I think there are real issues with how police interact with minority communities and I think there are perceived grievances that may or may not be mere agitprop), the administration has kept the Racial Grievance Industry at full employment and they have also managed to effectively divide communities by demonizing police officers. It also explains the big push on income inequality a year or so ago.

We can’t be passive in the face of this full-court press by the administration and its bootlicks to make the ownership of firearms so onerous that it will deter many from doing so. But we need to keep this administration’s record front and center. Otherwise the terrorists will have won.

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